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She was born in Kamouraska, Quebec, where she married her first husband, Étienne Leclerc, in 1900. After he and both of her parents died in 1911 and 1912, Meilleur left two of her four surviving children in 1913 and moved to the Ontario border. Only once, in 1939, did she return to the Quebec area. The supercentenarian had six further children by her second husband, Hector Meilleur, whom she married in 1915. After his death in 1972, she lived first with a daughter and then in a nursing home in Corbeil. She had 85 grandchildren, 80 great-grandchildren, 57 great-great-grandchildren, and four great-great-great-grandchildren.

Meilleur smoked tobacco into her nineties.[2][3] By the time she died of a blood clot at age 117 in April 1998 in Corbeil, Ontario, one of her sons was also living in the same nursing home, and her oldest living daughter, Gabrielle Vaughan, was 90 years old.[4][5]